From an early morning poodlewalk with Kalani along Esplanade Beach at Victor Harbor:
It is an abstracter of the remaining supports of the old wooden causeway to Granite Island that has been replaced by a concrete one.
seaweed abstractions
The modest abstractures below were made whilst walking along the coastal rocks west of Dep's Beach with Maya on a late afternoon poodlewalk.They are part of a series (the blog posts are now a notebook) as the photos do not typically reward attention as particulars, but rather as members of a group or a series of photographic abstractions.
I am struggling to find material on this form of abstraction understood as imagery that has been ‘abstracted’ from nature. In the visual arts abstraction is understood in modernist terms--which presupposed the specificity of the arts ( painting, sculpture etc) and their purity. Abstraction in modernism is the divergence from representation, figuration and narrative. Whilst abstraction in painting stood for a purely autonomous, autotelic art and a universally legible language, photographic abstraction is usually seen as decoration -- a splash of colour and cheap profundity for the boardroom or bedroom.
That much is well known. The difficulty I'm encountering is going beyond this 20th century art history to rethink photographic abstraction in the 21st century. The puzzle is: what is abstraction’s contemporary artistic meaning and significance beyond rejecting realism and the parochialism of the figure/ground distinction or returning to or rescuing abstraction from its obsolesence, as the familiar, wholesome, and spiritually nourishing in reaction to the Global Financial Crisis.
orange abstraction
A recent addition to an ongoing series:
I have to admit that I have walked past this particular tree many times whilst walking with Maya. I didn't see the colours or the shape of the orange. How come I missed it so many times? I wasn't looking obviously.
salt abstraction #5
This photo was made in the summer of 2024. The location is around the western corner of Petrel Cove on the southern Fleurieu Peninsula. It was the late afternoon to avoid the bright light of the summer sun.
The dried out salt depends on high tides, no sand cover, and the summer heat to evaporate the seawater in the rock pools during the day. Outside of summer there are the various rock pools that do not evaporate.
sandstone abstraction
A section of the sandstone cliffs in the Great Otway National Park in Victoria:
The area is between Point Franklin and Parker Inlet, and it is only accessible in low tide.
trunk abstract #4
The abstraction below was made whilst I was on a poodlewalk with Maya, our young standard poodle, in the local bushland in Waitpinga on the southern Fleurieu Peninsula in South Australia early in the morning.
From memory it had been raining overnight. It was in the mid-winter of 2023. Maya would have been about 6 months old then, and it would have been a training walk. She was learning to stay with me whilst we walked through the bushland.
a b+w version
This black and white version of an abstract rock formation near Petrel Cove is from the archives in 2019.
A colour version, which was posted in 2019, is here.
I have been starting to research and write about photographic abstraction that moves beyond the modernist idea of abstraction as non-figuration of the mid-twentieth century. Whilst doing so I have been working my way through the archives.
quartz abstraction #11
Whilst on the early morning poodlewalk with Maya along the littoral zone of the coastal rocks on the southern Fleurieu Peninsula I started scoping for a possible 5x4 photo session. As Maya is now starting to hang around me whilist I spend time photographing I reckoned it would be possible to use a 5x4 with a dark cloth.
This is what I came up with today --- a close up, or macro view, of an isolated rock with a quartz vein:
I had photographed the rock a few days earlier from a broader perspective.
wood abstraction: a note
This is an abstraction of the old, wooden Granite Island causeway at Victor Harbor in South Australia.
The causeway was in such a bad condition that it could not be repaired. It has been dismantled and replaced by a concrete one. There are just a few pieces left at both the Victor Harbor and Granite Island ends. They -- the heritage remnants -- appear to function as viewing platforms.
No doubt, many photographers would say this picture is not an abstraction. Others would point to the formal design of the picture and say that it is formalist but not even a weak abstraction. So I wrote a brief post on abstraction on the thoughtfactory website in an effort to open up a space for the possibility of contemporary photographic abstractions.
quartz abstraction #10
I cannot remember the exact location of this macro photo of quartz and lichen that I constructed as an abstraction. It was made in the late summer -- the digital file says early February 2022.
Looking at the surrounding files I can see that I would have been walking from Dep's Beach back to the car that would have been parked at Kings Beach lookout. It was made whilst on an afternoon poodlewalk as it was around 7pm.